Montpellier, France – November 19th, 2015 – We could not be happier! One of our Methys lab start-up, Powertime, just won the Digiworld Summit Award for Africa & Middle East along with three other inspiring start-ups that were competing for the regions Americas, Asia, and Montpellier.

The DigiWorld Summit Award is an initiative in partnership with La French Tech and IDATE that recognises digital industry start-ups founded by French entrepreneurs outside France. The award was decided by a jury of 11 top individuals in the international Digital industry, and supported by Accenture, Orange, Cap Gemini, Ericsson, Serena Capital and others. The selection was done out of 40 applications for the Africa & Middle East region. We would like to thank the jury members who selected Powertime among this pool of amazing African & Middle Eastern projects and who believed in the Powertime pledge to empower users in their energy consumption. We would also like to give a shout-out to the other finalists in the category Africa & Middle East, who are also making their mark on their respective local tech startup scene: Everjobs from Ivory Coast and Pzartech from Israel.

Unfortunately, Powertime’s managing director Sébastien Lacour couldn’t be present at the event as he is currently expecting a happy event with the birth of his second child in Cape Town. Our group chairman and co-founder of Powertime, Christophe Viarnaud, was sent to the 37th annual DigiWorld Summit to represent Powertime along with 3 other members of the Methys Group team to receive the prize.

Sebastien Lacour, Managing Director of Powertime said “Leveraging on the experience Methys has built in recent year with big data / social analytics, mCommerce, and energy management, Powertime is well positioned to provide solutions for the future smart homes and an interesting business model based on social data and eCommerce. With this award, we get a fantastic recognition for the hard work done by our teams in the past few year, and we look forward to accelerate our growth, in particular with the support of Orange, and in particular in emerging markets where prepayment is dominant”

Christophe Viarnaud, Co-Founder & Chairman of Powertime, and CEO of Methys group, added “Powertime, incubated by the Methys Labs in Cape Town’s Silicon Cape, is the 4th start up project we are generating in less than 5 years. It demonstrates our ability to leverage on our core expertise in big data, mobile applications and eCommerce to generate business ideas, which rapidly become successful business ventures. We are thrilled to receive the top award for Africa & Middle East at DigiWorld, and look forward to the future progress of this venture as more partnerships unfolds. This is also a recognition of the success of La French Tech in Cape Town and the project, strongly supported by key French Tech companies to establish a French Tech Hub in Cape Town as a gateway into Sub Saharan Africa”

This prize is an opportunity for Powertime and the Methys Labs to get more international exposure and represent the dynamism of the Silicon Cape region outside South Africa. As a direct result of the competition, Powertime will also receive close support from the Orange incubator providing a valuable relationship with experts from Orange that will hopefully support further growth.